But I suspect such a blog would not be popular.
(Next level: unleash the AI to find such under-posted topics, check them against your list of interests, and offer to you for inspiration.)
1) There's always a new cohort of people that don't know the things you know. You assume since you know it, everyone does. But kids coming up, or whoever, aren't you. They don't know this stuff yet. You can easily be the first time they've heard "make something people want" and where that comes from. The Curse of Knowledge https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse_of_knowledge
2) There's always another tone/anecdote/verse that makes whatever idea more palatable to someone out there. They might not like the PG version, or the Wired version or the Daring Fireball version, whatever. There's probably some version of you in this lesson that someone out there vibes better with.
"I used to struggle w needing to be “creative” or “original” in my work. At some point I had a breakthrough that really helped me: I cannot repeat an idea, no matter how basic or common, without imparting some of my worldview into it.
Even by choosing which basic ideas to amplify, I impart some small amount of myself into each output. It’s literally impossible for a given tweet to be “unoriginal”. Equally impossible to be Truly Original too of course, since you’re always remixing others thoughts.
This POV does put a premium on cultivating and developing one’s worldview, since that is the underlying originality simmering under the surface of each “basic” thought. The best writing is rewriting, including of other people’s words, and the lens is your whole mind."
There is a place for complex blog posts on arcane subjects but posts on "common knowledge" are even more important. There is a 15 year old out there somewhere that needs to know how to use the different smart pointers in C++ or how to properly care for a cast iron pan.
(Aside, for a lot of cooking I’ve gone back to dead trees and I realized one day I have so many cookbooks, why am I looking at some lifestyle recipe blogger?)
Or the information actually goes out of date and best practices change. There’s been like 25 years of standard revisions since I first learned C++.
As a young mathematician in grade school, I had boundless enthusiasm to prove and present basic theorems in number theory and geometry. Now, as a PhD mathematician who has since pivoted into other fields, when I'm considering new mathematical content, I feel only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes all around me asking, "Don't you think this been done before, better, by others? Do you really want to waste your and your readers' time with your DIY reinvention? Are you not just noise competing with other noise, drowning out the valuable signals in your domain for your own personal gain?"
All this to say, on a statistical level, it is fair to say no one ever has any original thoughts, and the ones most capable of elucidating existing ideas can be the ones least motivated to do so.
If every blog, op-ed, and social media post in the world were stripped of all informatic redundancy, what would the compression ratio be? Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.
This statement, combined with the previous one, is interesting, to say the least. It could easily be taken as self-aggrandizing, and maybe your feeling of "only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes" is partly because of your style?
> Among these resources in particular, I just see the same old arguments and observations trotted out in varying tonal registers.
Languages are themselves redundant, because it aids in comprehension.
Sometimes people need to hear the same thing over and over before it sinks in.
Sometimes it needs to be said in different ways, before it sinks in.
Sometimes it can be short and pithy, and other times it can fill a short book.
How many books simply restate and elucidate the Serenity Prayer? As far as I can see, their numbers are legion, and, more to the point, many of them sell.
tl;dr: Yes, everything worth saying has been said before. That doesn't mean that it's not still worth saying.
But I can tell you there's a strong correlation between why you're writing a post and why I'll subscribe. If you're trying to hustle I don't give a shit. You're most likely another pseudo intellectual chasing whatever is hot. What I, personally, want is the experts. I want to see that depth of knowledge. I want to see how you think. I want to read a blog post where I get to know you, not some facade. Not everything needs to be a hustle. Find your niche and your niche will stick with you. If you try to write to everybody you'll end up writing to nobody. Concentrate on making me want to subscribe, not pestering me into it. You're not a used car salesman
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2026/feb/07/revealed-how-s...
With the advent of LLMs, I've felt even less need to publish publicly. It's as if an LLM can either produce something higher-quality and more tailored to the reader's context in a shorter period of time. Or the topic I write would be so niche that it should just be in a group chat.
LLMs won’t always do this well. The best ideas in my backlog are the ones where the LLMs won’t finish my thoughts because they’re contrary to what 1000 people said on a forum somewhere. Or because I’m relaying an original personal experience.
But even if LLMs can finish your thoughts, it’s probably good to post anyway. Because in five years LLMs, maybe two commercialized, or their trained opinion may shift. A dated blog post is a nice Ebeneezer, a memorial to the Zeitgeist it hails from.
And then they get bored and just go full bore ¿ conjunctivitis applique to unbound ¤ variable 》》-> is a Mongolian {....} ... forgetting they were in tutorial mode. Or, showing examples which embed syntax which is apparently the same as before but "oh shit, I forgot a : means something else in this context" so having explained syntactically what a : means.. confusing you again.
Or showing REPL prompts without explaining if the # is a prompt or part of the command. The list is frankly endless.
Decades ago, this was C programmers trying to explain basic imperative syntax and then using a "compute prime" with a recursive function call or a ternary operator or bitshift.
So my next blog maybe will be "seven cardinal sins of blogs about basics" which will have only one sin: forgetting the job, the only one job you had (or apparently set yourself)
There's ten thousand people new people each day, and someone has to be the first time they run into something :)
Improving articulations is a helpful skill for use with AI too.
I had a post on here this week that was briefly popular. There were numerous folks who posted that the material “wasn’t new.”
I felt like it should be implicit that people who already know what I was writing about are not the target audience. But here they were, commenting.
At the same time, the page got upvoted quite a lot and the comments were filled with folks who had lots of interesting reactions and additions. Despite the fact that this was “old news”, it seemed implicit that for many it was new news.
Sometimes we should trigger conversation. I believe we shouldn’t index on novelty- we should index on impact. Your post is a nice defense of those who discover and share what they discover.
Not self-aggrandizing. There are very few things that I consider myself "(among the) most capable" of explaining, and most of them are not interesting to people. There are many more things that I'm somewhat competent in explaining, but those suffer the intimidation of the eyes.
> Maybe your feeling of "only the stymying influence of a million invisible eyes" is partly because of your style?
Not sure how you mean "style," but it is some sort of inferiority complex or insecurity. I do not claim it is a good or rational feeling.
> How many books simply restate and elucidate the Serenity Prayer? As far as I can see, their numbers are legion, and, more to the point, many of them sell. tl;dr: Yes, everything worth saying has been said before. That doesn't mean that it's not still worth saying.
Religion is a primeval failure mode of language, in my opinion, or at least an example of language being used not to communicate information, but to engage in social, emotional, and political ritual. Are those rituals a good thing on the whole? Even if they are, why dress it up with all these theological truth propositions and elaborately fraudulent mythologies? Why do we have to be so verbose and repetitious, and pretend there's really 10,000 books' worth of depth to the Serenity Prayer?
taneq•1h ago